This year, we continued on our three year journey of transformation to become the clear choice. We stimulated growth in our business, turned the spotlight back up on our Values and reflected on and communicated our Purpose

KPMG and The Consumer Goods Forum have conducted a study of 539 executives from the consumer goods industry. Top line growth is the key goal for almost everyone in the industry, but what are the most prevalent levers for driving it?

Software Asset Management

Software Asset Management is critical to the effectiveness of your business. KPMG provides a wide area of Software and Licence management services

Our Software Advisory team provides a wide array of services related to software asset management and software license compliance. We have helped leading global corporations (including many of the FTSE 250) to address challenges related to Software Asset Management compliance exposure, optimising costs, and achieving overall IT maturity. A selection of the services we commonly perform are listed below.

Quantification of Licence Position

Licence Optimisation

Procurement Advice

Lifecycle Review and Maturity Assessments

Tool Selection and Optimisation

Deep expertise of vendor audit programmes and vendor licensing

We make no secret of the fact that we work with many software vendors conducting software licensing reviews on their behalf. Vendors trust us to conduct reviews of their most valued customers and expect us to work in a professional, independent manner and to maintain or even enhance their customer relationships.

We deliver thousands of licence compliance and other reviews for software vendors including Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP, and EMC every year. At any one time our team is working on over 1,000 reviews globally. We have regular contact with many other vendors including SAP, Adobe and Symantec and receive continual training from them in relation to licensing of their products.

As a result of our work with these vendors we have deep subject matter expertise not only of software licence terms and conditions, but also how vendors sell their software, what systems and data can be made available to assist customers in managing their licences and, possibly most importantly, the common problems which customers face when managing software. A core aspect of this work is the collection of PoE data and reconciling information from multiple sources.

Key benefits

Key benefits of SAM can be summarised as: reduce costs, limit risk and increased efficiency associated with use of software in your business.

Reduce costs through:

Improve licence agreement negotiations

Avoid over/under purchasing

Increase volume licensing discounts

Avoid competing purchases

Realise full upgrade discounts

Re-use software disposed with hardware

Reduce maintenance costs

Limit Risk through:

Proactive software licence compliance

Avoid unmonitored software deployment

Avoid lost entitlement records

Realise control

Increase efficiency:

Monitor and manage cost savings

Labour performance improvement

Hardware improvements

Reduce help desk time

Streamline IT procurement and operations

Why SAM programmes fail

Five reasons why SAM programmes fail

Boil the Ocean. Not having a clearly defined scope of what is Software Asset Management, what business areas are included and what constitutes a measurable success.

Tools Project. Approaching Software Asset Management as a tools project and not including business process changes.

Value. A SAM programme doesn’t happen overnight and failure to show value along the way is certain to be the death of the project. A lot of budgets and projects never see the light of day, or are cut by senior management who do not have all the facts regarding the need, or ultimate results.

Diversity. Software Asset Management requires lots of different business skills, like commercial awareness, technical awareness, HR, contract management, legal awareness on a local as well as international level and of course crucially a thorough understanding of licensing rules. Not taking these this into account will cause your SAM project to fail.

“ Software publisher audits are on the increase and there is greater awareness of this risk. The best defence to this is to routinely perform self-audits. The first one will take a while so it is important to think about automating the process as much as possible during the self-audit process. Detailed licensing knowledge is also key to conducting self-audits in an efficient manner.”

KPMG's Annual Software Dinner

Software Asset Management around the globe

We have a global team of over 400 professionals working across 25 countries to draw from to provide you with the resource to meet your requirements. This specialist team focuses on software licensing and delivers both software asset management and software compliance reviews.

KPMG International Cooperative ("KPMG International") is a Swiss entity. Member firms of the KPMG network of independent firms are affiliated with KPMG International. KPMG International provides no client services. No member firm has any authority to obligate or bind KPMG International or any other member firm vis-à-vis third parties, nor does KPMG International have any such authority to obligate or bind any member firm.